


The Ex-Girlfriend Club

by Frea_O



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Clock Tower, Ex-Girlfriends, F/M, Gen, Grenade Launchers, Shenanigans, Sisters, Sparring, Team of Awesome Ladies, Violence, vengeance, warning: assault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-27
Updated: 2013-11-27
Packaged: 2018-01-02 19:40:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1060799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frea_O/pseuds/Frea_O
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Believe it or not, having slept with Oliver Queen is not the only thing they have in common. They kick a lot of ass, too. Now if only they could decide on a name.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ex-Girlfriend Club

**Author's Note:**

> A Tumblr conversation with [FelicityRemarkableSmoak](http://felicityremarkablesmoak.tumblr.com) inspired this. It’s set a couple of years in the future, giving Laurel time for her fall from grace and her rise into vigilantism. No, she’s not the Black Canary in this fic. But neither is she a pushover. (Also, don’t worry, Felicity is not part of the ex-girlfriend club)

Stomping in the Clock Tower wasn’t out of place, but it did usually portend unpleasant things. So when Sara stormed in with a face like a thunderclap, Laurel ducked a swing from Shado, rolled away, and held her hands up in a time-out. There was a fifty-fifty chance it wouldn’t work, as Shado pointed out that nothing would stop an oncoming enemy that wanted to kill you (she was such a ray of sunshine to be around), but apparently Shado was curious, too, for she immediately dropped into a resting stance.

Sara stomped over to the weapons rack and grabbed the long-bow. Laurel and Shado exchanged a look.

“Okay, what’s happened now?” Laurel asked.

Sara slung a quiver across her torso. “The henchmen didn’t provide enough of a challenge. I need to beat something.”

“So you’re going to use my bow?” Shado asked.

“Yes.”

“If I find out you’re beating things with my bow, I will kick your ass.”

“You could try.” 

“Try, and succeed,” Shado said.

Sara’s sneer seemed distracted. Laurel might not understand After Sara very often, but she’d been the woman’s sister for years. She recognized the look: something, very deep down, was bothering her sister.

“If you two are done?” Laurel asked.

She expected a snippy response; she didn’t expect both women to swivel and glare at her. “Do I need to beat the stick out of your ass again?” Sara asked.

“Why is your first reaction always violence?”

“Because I’m in a bad mood!”

“That much is obvious,” Shado said. She crossed over to the edge of the training mat—both she and Sara had protested even having training mats in the Tower, but Laurel had pointed out that if they were going to be teaching her _how to break people’s necks_ , they were going to be civilized vigilantes and lay down a damn mat first—and snatched up a bottle of water, gulping heavily. A few months before, she wouldn’t have even broken a sweat training with Laurel, so Laurel was more than a little pleased to see it. “But I’m more curious as to why.”

“You do usually feel better after beating the crap out of some henchmen,” Laurel said. 

Sara scowled and sighed. The little kick motion she did with her boot against a post was pure and total Before Sarah. “One of the henchmen called us the Ex-Girlfriend Club.”

“The what?” Shado and Laurel both asked.

“The Ex-Girlfriend Club.” With a snarl of annoyance, Sara turned and fired off a shot at Franklin, the training dummy. 

The arrow vibrated a couple of times in the silence afterward. Franklin, Laurel thought, was doomed never to bear any children.

“Wait, Ex-Girlfriend—you’re joking.”

“No, apparently the bad guys of Starling City have put it together.” This time, Sara aimed at the silhouette at the back of the range that Bertinelli money had paid for. Her shot was a little off the mark; Shado had always been and would always be the best shot with the bow. “They’ve seen every single one of us fighting alongside the Green Arrow, and have assumed that we’re all his ex-girlfriends. Hence, the Ex-Girlfriend Club.”

“But we’re so much more than that,” Laurel said, blinking. “I mean, we took down the Hive. While Team Arrow was all tied up in Iron Heights.”

“Among many other things,” Shado said, drily. “Raise your elbow a little, Canary.”

“It’ll still hit,” Sara said.

“Yes, but it will not hit the thing you want it to hit. Raise your elbow.”

“They have a point, you know.” Helena Bertinelli didn’t stomp into the lair, though, like Sara, she was dressed for combat. She shrugged off her leather duster and hung it by the door, next to Laurel’s red armor. “All of us have, at one point or another, slept with Oliver Queen.”

Sara and Laurel exchanged an uneasy look.

“You can’t deny it,” Helena said.

Shado eyed the Huntress. “No, I don’t suppose you can, but perhaps you could stop poking at a sensitive bruise.” 

“Feeling touchy?” Helena’s smile could cut glass.

Shado muttered something in Chinese. Though Laurel had been taking lessons, it was one of the phrases Shado had yet to teach her, so Laurel was just going to assume it was something not particularly flattering to their teammate, and leave it at that. The team had enough discord going on, there was no particular need to add to it.

And she really wished she had learned that lesson earlier on in life. She would have spent so many fewer years angry at the world, without a single outlet for her anger.

“So what?” she asked, stretching her triceps. Shado had gotten a hit there that even an amateur could have blocked. “At some point we all had to have realized the connection. So what if the bad guys have, too?”

“Well, I don’t particularly like being boiled down to nothing but a connection to a guy I used to sleep with,” Sara said, firing off another shot. She’d raised her elbow a little, Laurel noted, but Laurel knew better than to comment. 

“Did you still kick the bad guy’s ass?”

“Duh.”

“I rest my case, then.”

“Damned lawyers,” Sara said under her breath, but her breathing was more even as she loaded another arrow into the silhouette. 

“Motion to rename our little cabal to the Ex-Girlfriends of Oliver Queen Consortium, just to make him sweat,” Helena said.

“Motion denied,” Laurel and Shado said. 

“We still need a name.”

“Not that one, we don’t,” Shado said. “I’m going for a run.”

“Work, work, work,” Helena said.

“You’d do well to get some aerobic exercise in yourself.”

“Pass.” Helena gave them an absent wave as she headed up to the loft, where they kept their computer systems and surveillance. Shado allowed one final eye-roll as she headed for the door with her running shoes in hand.

Once Shado was out of the room, Sara put the longbow down. “Want to spar?” she asked.

“Depends.” Laurel kept stretching. She’d grown up taking martial arts lessons with her sister, but whatever had happened to Sara in the seven years away, the transformation that had turned her from Before Sara to After Sara, it had had the benefit of molding her into the scariest fighter Laurel had ever seen. And Sara didn’t always have Shado’s patience for training. “Are you still pissed off at some random henchman and going to take it out on me?”

“Yes,” Sara said, “but you’re also pissed off at Helena and going to take it out on me.”

“That is not even remotely the same thing.”

“And why not?”

“Because we’re always pissed off at Helena?” Laurel stretched out the hamstring that had been giving her trouble. “She courts chaos. We all have reasons not to like that.”

“Courts? Hell, she sleeps with chaos, and we get to pick up the pieces.” Sara made the first move, turning the match instantly into a grapple. She’d done that on purpose: Laurel had always preferred the striking arts to grappling, which was why the other women on the team used it to push her out of her comfort zone. Thankfully, she’d been anticipating that; she threw Sara off easily. Sara smirked a little as she landed and rolled to her feet, and the sisters circled each other. “Why do we put up with her, anyway?”

“Because it’s hard to practice law after you’ve been disbarred for drug abuse and it’s equally hard to earn a paycheck when society thinks you died seven years ago,” Laurel said, striking out.

Sara dodged and tried to land a blow on Laurel’s ribcage. Laurel blocked that, ducked the follow-up swipe, and continued blocking as Sara backed her toward the corner of the mat.

“Did I strike a nerve?” she asked when she finally managed to flip out of the way.

Sara scowled. “You weren’t disbarred over drug abuse. It was corrupt politicians.”

“Yeah, well, never sleep with your boss.” Laurel tried to sweep Sara’s feet out from under her. “And stay off drugs.”

Sara grunted and put Laurel in a headlock. “We don’t have to start calling Helena our sugar mama, do we?” 

Laurel struggled until she could see black sparks at the edges of her vision, and then tapped out, a little harder than she needed to. Sara could have at least made it _look_ difficult to take her down. When Sara released her, she fell to her hands and knees and gulped in oxygen. “As the thought of that woman being a mother in any capacity is enough to keep me up at night, I’ll say no way in hell.”

“Good.” Sara helped Laurel up. “Again?”

“I need a minute,” Laurel said, and the minute she uttered the words, she knew that was a mistake. Shado and Sara must have had the same instructor at some point because admitting any sort of weakness immediately invoked an attack.

Like right then. Laurel dodged out of the way, though she was inconvenienced by the fact that she was already on the ground and Sara was on her feet. Luck had her hooking a foot behind Sara’s ankle, though her sister still had her pinned within twenty seconds of hitting the mat. 

“Bitch,” Laurel said.

“If you were right, I’d be much harsher in my teachings,” Sara pointed out. She added insult to injury by shifting and just sitting down on Laurel’s back. “Felicity. What brings you by the Ex-Girlfriend Club Lair?”

Felicity Smoak, who still had one hand on the doorknob, stood in the doorway. She had a rather smart jacket folded over one arm, and her eyes behind her glasses were comically wide. “The what?” she asked.

Sara jumped to her feet, which of course shoved Laurel into the mat for a split-second. Laurel, scowling, pushed herself to her feet more slowly. On the surface, she liked Felicity Smoak: the woman was smart and pretty funny in her own right, and she’d saved Laurel’s ass a couple of times by fixing various computers for her, even back before Laurel had run afoul of the Star County Bar Association. But none of that really made it any easier to be around her, when all Laurel wondered was what Oliver had told this woman about her. What embarrassing secrets had he spilled? What did Felicity know?

“The bad guys have figured out in the most sexist way possible that all the people on my team have slept with Oliver Queen,” Sara said.

Felicity blinked. “ _How_?”

“We’ve all been seen either assisting or getting helped by the Green Arrow,” Laurel said, picking up her water bottle from the bench by the mats. “So therefore we must have been sleeping with him.”

“Which we all were, at some point,” came from the loft.

Felicity immediately froze. “She’s here?” she said in an undertone to Sara. “Crap. I didn’t see her bike.”

“Stay in the loft!” Sara called up the stairs. Helena’s hand appeared over the edge, one finger raised, but apparently she wasn’t in a psychotic mood today, for she stayed put. “Her bike’s in the shop. I forgot to warn you about that.”

“Ask her if she wants to join our club!” Helena called down.

Laurel rolled her eyes.

“Would that require being an ex-girlfriend of Oliver Queen first?” Felicity said.

“Yes,” Laurel said. “Membership dues is breaking up with Oliver Queen, because that’s apparently all that we are.”

“Um, then never sounds good for me. I’m hoping for never. I dropped by to update your computers because I have a feeling that you didn’t run that update packet I sent.” Felicity gave Sara a rebuking look.

The blonde shrugged. “Good luck with that, Helena’s probably watching snuff films on the computer. We can get some training in while you wait.”

“Or I can just install it later, if you like,” Laurel said.

“Would you? It’ll make the systems a lot faster and harder for anybody but me to get into them from the outside. Plus, less lag time with the comms you use. And it fixes a bug that—”

“I’m sure it’s awesome,” Laurel said because if you let Felicity talk computers, you could be there for awhile.

“Yep, it totally is. Laurel, do you think I could talk to you for a minute?”

“Robbery on Fourth and Lexington,” Helena called from the loft.

“Your turn,” Sara called back, and they heard a delighted laugh and the zipper of Helena’s suit go up. A black and purple blur sped by on the stairs a minute later, while the sisters and Felicity waited.

“She totally just took my car, didn’t she?” Felicity asked with a resigned look.

“Probably,” Sara said.

“Want me to give you a ride back to Verdant?” Laurel said.

“Would you? I was only just dropping by. Where’s Shado?”

“Running. I’m gonna go grab a shower. See you later, ’Lis.” With an absent wave over her shoulder, Sara headed for the bathroom, leaving Laurel and Felicity by themselves.

Well, this was awkward. Apparently Felicity thought so, too, for she shifted her feet as Laurel collected her jacket and her keys. “Sorry about the car thing,” Laurel said. “There’s a small chance she won’t crash it.”

“Then she’ll key it or leave it abandoned in the Glades instead. There’s a reason I have really good insurance.” Felicity was quiet as they headed down the stairs and to the abandoned parking lot they used for their transportation. “But I do appreciate you trying to put a positive spin on things. That’s really nice of you, and it’s great because you have every reason not to be nice to me, and all.”

“Huh?” Laurel asked.

“I…did not mean to say that last bit out loud.” Felicity scrunched her face up. “Rambling when awkward is one of those things I’m never going to grow out of. Besides, it’s one of those chicken or the egg things: do I ramble because I feel awkward or do I feel awkward because I ramble?”

“I don’t know,” Laurel said as she climbed into the driver’s seat. “Is there any particular reason you feel awkward?”

“I think I might be entitled, walking into a group that is joking about literally having named their super-cool home base the ‘Ex-Girlfriend Lair’ and I’m dating the man in question, probably.” Felicity sighed and buckled in. “I did put it together, but I wasn’t going to bring it up. It wasn’t a bit deal, but now it’s…”

“Weird?” Laurel said. “It’s weirder for Sara and me, if that makes you feel better.”

“God, I can’t even imagine. I mean, I don’t have any siblings, so I’m a little stymied there to start, but the whole thinking my sister was dead so I can’t even really be mad at her even though she totally slept with my boyfriend thing would just be—” Felicity grimaced and raked her hands down her face. “Why am I still talking? This is a nightmare.”

Laurel didn’t think it was really _that_ much of a nightmare. Awkward, after all, had nothing on waking up in a cold sweat, thinking that the Dollmaker had found her again and had finished his work while she lay strapped down and helpless. “We worked it out. And it’s all okay now. There’s no reason to feel awkward about it.”

“No, mostly I think the awkwardness is walking into the Ex-Girlfriend’s Club and seeing how amazing all of you are. Kick-ass lawyer—”

“Ex-lawyer.”

“Crazy-pants mob boss daughter, the pre-med student who knows two hundred ways to kill me without a weapon, and Sara, of course. It’s a terrifying club.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, or anything,” Laurel said, turning onto the highway that would take them into the Glades, “but if unfortunately you did become an ex, I think you’d actually fit right in.”

Felicity blinked at her in shock a few times. “Really?”

This conversation was really growing to be too much. Laurel liked Felicity, she really did, but… “What did you want to talk about?” 

“Oh. Uh.” Felicity pinched the bridge of her nose. “You might want to pull over.”

“Trust me, I can take it.” Though something sank in the pit of Laurel’s stomach.

“There’s not really a nice way to put it, so I’ll just take the ‘rip off the band-aid’ approach. So, here goes. They let Adam Donner out of prison. I scrubbed the internet of your contact information already, but he’s probably going to find you. I only just found out about it, otherwise I would have told you earlier.” 

Laurel’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “They let him out?”

“Judge overturned the conviction today. I’m sorry.”

Another failure in the justice system. Laurel gritted her teeth hard, the anger that had been a constant companion ever since her father had told her that the _Queen’s Gambit_ had sent a distress signal and nobody was picking up, and why hadn’t he heard from Sara lately?, began to well up behind her chest. Tears prickled and burned at the edges of her eyelids. “That monster should be in prison for the rest of his life.”

“I agree. Oliver wants you to stay at the Foundry for a couple of days. He and Diggle—” 

“No. Adam Donner tried to destroy my life once, he’s not going to again.” Still, Laurel had to swallow hard several times. “Does my father know?”

“I wanted to tell you first, but there’s a chance he heard at work. It would probably be easiest on him if you went and stayed with him for a couple of days. Maybe? You and Sara both?”

“I’ll be fine.” But this was, Laurel realized, an argument she would have with everybody in her life while Adam Donner walked around as a free man. Well, maybe not Helena, but Shado would become quiet and watchful, and Laurel knew she would wake in the middle of the night and discover Sara asleep on her floor, the way she first had after Adam Donner had suffered a psychological break at the hands of Ra’s al Ghul’s daughter and had fixated on killing her. He’d damn near succeeded, too.

And now he was a free man. Because the justice system had failed another.

“I’ll be fine,” she said again. She pulled into the parking lot for Verdant and waved off the valet. “I swear, I will. But thank you for the head’s up.”

“Anytime. And, um, if you need somebody to talk to about it…”

Laurel didn’t point out that she had her team for that. She just nodded her thanks, and Felicity climbed out of the car. 

“I’ll keep an eye on him, digitally,” she said, leaning in the passenger window. “Give you a warning if I think he’s making a move. You’ve got people there for you, you know? Even ones that aren’t ex-girlfriends of Oliver Queen.”

“Well, he kind of has a lot of those,” Laurel said, and then cringed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like—”

“No, trust me, if there’s anybody that gets that, it’s me. I—” Felicity broke off as Laurel’s cell phone began to chirp with the _Psycho_ theme. “Is that for who I think it’s for?”

“Yeah, it’s Helena. Hold on a sec.” Laurel thumbed on the Bluetooth in her car. “Don’t tell me the robbery was too much for you.”

“Laurel.” The voice was a rasp over broken, scratched vocal cords and it was definitely, definitely not Helena. Every part of Laurel’s body gave a visceral jerk as the temperature in the parking lot plummeted. For one heart-stopping eternity, she was in her apartment again, staring at Sara’s bleeding and unconscious form and fighting desperately, intensely for any bit of oxygen in the plastic bag Adam had shoved over her head. Only one last surge of strength—not my sister, _not my sister, you asshole_!—had stood between her and death.

“Adam,” she said.

Felicity wordlessly climbed into the car and yanked a tablet out of her bag.

“Long time,” Adam said. “Missed you. Thought about you. A lot.”

“Where’s my friend? Is she alive?”

“There was a time I would have given my left nut to throw anybody named Bertinelli in prison,” Adam said. “And yet, here, I’ll be just as happy killing this one.”

“What do you want, Adam?” Laurel watched Felicity type away at the laptop, the way the light reflected off of her friend’s glasses, with an impending sense of detachment. Fear might have coated the back of her throat with oil and frozen her fingers to nubs, but it almost felt like she might just drift right out of her body, to float away into the ether and never return.

“You know what I want. You know who I want.”

Laurel wanted to ask him, “Didn’t you take _enough_? Didn’t you take everything? Didn’t you taint everything in my life—my job, my apartment, my sanity?”

Instead, she said, “Is my friend alive?”

“For now,” Adam said. “I’ll keep it simple. For your friend to live, you take her place. I see the vigilante, she dies. You don’t come, she dies.”

“And what will you do if I do come?”

“Well, Laurel, I’ll probably kill you.”

Felicity sucked in a breath and bared her teeth without looking up from the tablet. Laurel was too numb and cold to do the same.

“You’re definitely going to die,” Adam said. “But you can save the Bertinelli scum, if it means that much to you.”

No doubt he meant it to be demeaning, but instead, the words worked under Laurel’s skin, creeping down to the fire of rage that she had kept banked for so many years. In an instant, the numbness wore off. She sat up and twisted the key in the ignition. “‘It’ is a ‘she,’ you asshole,” she said. “If you so much as breathe on her wrong, I will rip out your esophagus and strangle you with it.”

“Fourth and Lexington,” Adam said. “You have ten minutes.”

“I’ll be there in five.” Laurel disconnected the call.

“Strangle him with his esophagus?” Felicity asked, giving her a wide-eyed look.

“Did you trace the call?”

“Yeah, it’s a burn phone. He’s where he says he is. I’m going to call Oliver—”

“No. If the Oliver shows up, he’ll kill her. I may not like her very much, but she’s my teammate.” Laurel slammed the car into the next gear, listening to the scream of the engine rotating as she pushed her tiny car to its limits. “We can handle this.”

“Oliver’s going to be pissed,” Felicity said.

“Let him be.” Laurel tapped Sara’s number on the speed-dial. “Adam Donner’s out,” she said without preamble.

Sara’s curse filled the car.

“He’s got Helena. Get Shado and get to Fourth and Lexington.”

“What are you going to do? Laurel, don’t you dare do anything stu—”

“Get Shado,” Laurel said, and hung up.

“What _are_ you going to do?” Felicity looked wide-eyed but not terrified; she’d likely seen scarier things than Adam Donner on a daily basis, what with the types of villains and criminals Oliver took on. Or she could have been reacting to Laurel’s driving.

“He hit me at my lowest point. I’m a hell of a lot stronger now.”

“And he’s a lot crazier,” Felicity said. She held up her phone. “Oh, look, it’s Oliver. I guess you want me to ignore this call?”

“Answer if you like, but tell him if he comes anywhere near Donner while he has Helena, I won’t be happy.” Laurel caught Felicity’s look and sighed. “Fine, he can be the cavalry—the second cavalry. But my team handles this first.”

“Here, you talk to him. Fourth and Lexington is the First Bank of Starling City, I’m going to hack in.”

“You can hack a bank from a moving vehicle?”

“Please, like it’s hard?”

“I’m so glad you’re on our side,” Laurel said, and hit the ‘Talk’ button. “Ollie, it’s Laurel. Adam Donner has Helena. If he sees you, he kills her on sight.”

“Where’s Felicity?”

“Hacking into the bank in my passenger seat.”

By the time she swerved into a parking spot near the bank, she’d talked Oliver out of coming down to the bank himself, though she had a couple of hooded figures all ready to jump in should things go wrong. It should have made her feel better, but instead, fear and panic roiled in her gut, making her hands shake a little as she got out of the car. 

“Okay, I’m in,” Felicity said, climbing out of the car. “She’s still alive, but it looks like he’s holding her in the lobby, so at least that’s not the vault, which could have been tricky.”

“What are you doing?”

Felicity looked confused. “Going in with you. You can’t go in without backup.”

“Are you kidding? I’m not taking Oliver Queen’s girlfriend in there with me to get killed.”

“Excuse me? I think of you as a lot more than the ex, do me a favor of thinking more of me than the ‘current.’” Felicity snapped a cuff around her wrist and pressed a button on the tablet, which sent the contents of the tablet screen onto a little panel on the band. “I’m looping the footage so he won’t see us if we use the front entrance.”

“You can do that?”

“Would you please also stop sounding surprised that I can do things? It’s insulting.”

“In my defense,” Laurel said, eyeing the bank, “they are pretty remarkable things. He’ll expect us to go through the front door.”

“Which means he’s left you a secondary entrance for you to get yourself killed through?”

“Nope.” Laurel crossed around to her trunk and kicked it twice to unlock the secret compartment. Even as Felicity goggled at the trapdoor full of guns, Laurel pulled out a grenade launcher. She fitted in a teargas grenade. “Helena’s gonna be pissed.”

Felicity grabbed masks. “You _think_?”

“Can I see the security video?”

Felicity held out her wrist and Laurel studied the room for a moment, assessing it with cop’s eyes like her father had taught her at far too young an age. That had saved her life a few times, that training and that knowledge. She counted the exits, the vents, ignored the way Helena was prone on the floor, hands tied behind her back. That looked like blood on her friend’s temple, but Helena was definitely awake and blinking.

There had been so much blood. Sara, bleeding from a cut on her forehead, Laurel’s hands covered with her own blood and with Adam’s—

“Oh, hey,” Felicity said, brightening for a second. “My car!”

Laurel glanced over; Felicity’s tiny coupe was parked a few spaces away, completely unharmed. “Thanks,” she said, shaking off the force of the flashback.

“For what?”

“Never mind.” Laurel settled the mask on top of her head, not pulling it over her face yet, and grabbed her shotgun from its rack in the trunk, swinging it across her back on its strap. It felt weird not to be donning the red body armor tactical suit she’d designed when they’d first taken her job from her and used her consequent spiral into disgrace to free all of the convicts she had put away.

But the shotgun, gas mask, and grenade launcher would have to do.

“Badass,” Felicity said, grabbing a taser. 

Laurel strode up to the bank, about fifty yards away, and aimed. Helena really was going to kill her for this, but until Adam Donner was facedown and in handcuffs again, Laurel really didn’t give a damn.

She squeezed the trigger.

The force of the shot sent her backwards a tiny step. The grenade crashed through the glass and into the bank. “Well,” Felicity said, “I guess that bumper sticker I saw that one time is right. There’s not much that can’t be solved by the proper application of explosives.”

They pulled their masks down, ducked behind a car, and waited. Laurel glanced at her watch, counting down. When she heard the second shatter of glass, she told Felicity, “Stay put.” And then she rose to her feet, took two steps over, and swept her arm neatly across Adam Donner’s throat right as he leaned forward, coughing and choking, clotheslining him neatly to the ground.

He plummeted like a rock. In an instant, Laurel racked her shotgun and had it pointed at his face. “Stay down!”

He only coughed, though his eyes spoke of pure, crazed malevolence. Bastard hadn’t even changed out of the tattered Dolce & Gabbana they’d sent him to prison wearing. “I really want to meet the parole board that looked at your crazy ass and let you out, Donner,” Laurel said. “Felicity, would you mind getting Helena—oh, spoke too soon.” 

The second sound of glass shattering shouldn’t have surprised her, but the two thumps hitting the sidewalk did. Laurel nearly whirled, looking to fight off more attackers, but it was only her team: Helena, handcuffs broken on either wrist, had leapt out of the bank, looking wild-eyed and coughing. Shado and Sara had vaulted from the roof in full gear, eyes furious behind their masks. All five of them stood ranged around the prone Donner, looking somewhere between angry and confused.

“Is…that it?” Felicity finally asked.

Helena kicked Donner in the head. “Yeah, he was alone, but he got the drop on me. I’m going to go get my crossbow and take care of it.”

“No,” Laurel said. “He goes back to prison.”

“It usually takes a lot longer than this to take down the bad guy,” Felicity said.

“You realize prison was the one that let him out onto the street, right?” Sara asked as Shado silently pulled out a pair of cable ties and kicked Donner, who was still convulsing with coughs, onto his stomach so that she could tie him up. “There’s no telling if they won’t just put him right back out here.”

“Yes,” Laurel said. “But this time he broke into a bank instead of just assaulting a couple of women, so he’s got a better chance of staying in.”

“Laurel,” Sara said, quietly.

“Maybe somebody should call the police now,” Shado said. “Huntress, did he touch anything inside?”

“Of course he did. He’s an idiot.” Helena did not look at all happy about that prospect as she crossed her arms over her chest. “They’ve got more than enough evidence.”

“And video evidence at that,” Felicity said, fiddling with her wrist-cuff. “Whoops, strange how incriminating evidence just happens to land neatly filed in the Starling City PD’s archives like that. So weird.”

Sara grinned. “You’re all right, kid,” she told Felicity.

“We are the _same age_. Police have been notified.”

“Let’s toss this trash inside and get out of here,” Laurel said, giving into the urge—hey, she wasn’t perfect—and kicking him hard in the abdomen, right where she had the pale line of a scar running across her own belly. “I could really, really use a drink.”

“Verdant? I’ve got an in with the owner,” Felicity said. “Drinks are on him.”

“Fitting, considering this is the Oliver Queen Ex-and-Current Girlfriend Club,” Helena said. When Felicity glared at her, she rolled her eyes and held out the set of car keys. “Really should keep those in a better spot.” 

“I’ll ride with you,” Sara said to Laurel. They split off for various means of transportation, shedding pieces of their armor in the event that the police arrived before they could escape cleanly. The minute they were away, Sara turned and studied her sister critically. “How are you?”

“Pissed off as hell.” Laurel punched the car into gear. “They just let him out. I knew things were bad, but that bad?”

“Going to have nightmares?”

“Is this your way of angling to stay with me for a couple of days?” Laurel said, and Sara didn’t deny it. Laurel sighed. In truth, she _would_ sleep better having Sara around. “Deal, but you’re the one that has to tell Dad.”

“What happened with Donner?”

“I launched a grenade at him and then I took him down. You guys showed up. Excellent timing. Where on earth did you even come from?”

“The roof, where else?”

“Where else?” Laurel shook her head. “How many times do I have to tell you that you cannot fly? You are not an actual canary. And even if you were, you’re a canary, which is a song bird, not, like, a bird of prey or something.”

Sara fell silent for so long that Laurel glanced over. Instead of the annoyed look she fully expected to see, Sara seemed thoughtful, her chin slanted slightly upward. “What?” Laurel asked.

“Bird of Prey,” Sara said. “The Birds of Prey. I like that.”

“But…you’re the only bird-themed name.”

“Huntress could mean an owl.”

“So that’s two out of four.”

“Shado’s got that tattoo, and dragons fly. Close enough.”

“And Manhunter?” Laurel asked, tilting a brow skeptically.

Sara shrugged, but a slow, sneaky smile spread over her face. “Well, no offense, but you’re kind of a harpy sometimes.”

Laurel let out an offended laugh and punched her in the shoulder. “Hey!”

“I am duty-bound as your baby sister to inform you of these things, you know. I’m just doing my _job_ , Laurel.”

“Gosh, you’re such a jerk. I love you.”

“Love you, too. So…Birds of Prey?”

Laurel thought about it. “Beats the Oliver Queen Ex-Girlfriend Club by a mile.”

Twenty minutes later, Shado, Helena, Laurel, Felicity, and Sara raised the grasshopper drinks—the house special at Verdant—aloft: “To the Birds of Prey!”


End file.
